About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior

By David H. Hackworth

Called “everything a war memoir could possibly be” by The New York Times, this all-time classic of the military memoir genre now includes a new forward from bestselling author and retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink.

Whether he was fifteen years old or forty, David Hackworth devoted his life to the US Army and quickly became a living legend. However, he appeared on TV in 1971 to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam.

From Korea to Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis to Vietnam, Hackworth’s story is that of an exemplary patriot, played against the backdrop of the changing fortunes of America and the US military. This memoir is the stunning indictment of the Pentagon’s fundamental misunderstanding of the Vietnam conflict and of the bureaucracy of self-interest that fueled the war. With About Face, Hackworth has written what many Vietnam veterans have called the most important book of their generation and presents a vivid and powerful portrait of patriotism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Sep 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439144503

David H. Hackworth

Colonel David H. Hackworth served in the military for twenty-five years and received 110 medals for his service. He is the author of About Face, Hazardous Duty, The Price of Honor, and Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. He died in 2005.

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INTRODUCTION

A professional soldier’s life does not fit easily into memoir unless the soldier is a senior commander, and then the memoir centers on grand strategy and not the coarse details of the battlefield; an exception, and there are not very many, is the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. A common soldier’s life seems better suited to fiction, where the author can calibrate the distance between the protagonist and the material. The novelist can assert coherence and moral balance, and it is not necessary that he or she ever heard a shot fired in anger—Stephen Crane, for example, or Olivia Manning. The personality of the author is of no consequence; the best single explication of infantry tactics that I have ever read is in Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way. Of course the novelist is a writer first and foremost, comfortable on the higher slopes of irony and paradox. The novelist’s reality is a written reality, forged from facts and memories, fragments of this and that, reprocessed and rewired into a narrative, a story.

The soldier’s memory is a crowded place. More can happen in a minute of a soldier’s wartime than in a novelist’s lifetime—and happen again and again, moments of such excruciating incoherence that to shape it and balance it is to counterfeit it. One might as well try to shape a tempest. These moments are fantastic, scarcely credible, grotesque, sentimental, heartless, usually inexplicable, rarely of beauty—terrible or otherwise, though they can be noble. There is no distance between the man and the action. Nothing falls between the man and the chaotic moment except the years of training and anticipation, a predicament of exceptional awkwardness, according to a Northern soldier at Antietam. It is never as you thought it would be. It is hard to conceive of a more demanding assignment than leading troops into battle, and keeping them there, saying to a man, Do that, knowing that his death might result. A soldier in wartime is a law unto himself in a world unto itself, an exaggerated, exasperated world of utter disorder and misrule, the devil’s paradise; it is either that or unspeakably boring, weeks and months of oceanic tedium.

Yet there are those who love it, all of it: the drill, the bivouac, the mess tent, the duty, the noise, and the silence. Probably no segment of American society is as little known and little understood as the professional Army. It is a nation apart, with its particular customs, laws, language, economy, virtues, and vices. This is a state of affairs that seems to suit everyone; the civilians can retail clichés about the soldiers, and the soldiers retail clichés about themselves, with no one the wiser. The Army is as hierarchical as the church and as class-conscious and snobbish as Great Britain, West Point its Eton and the Army War College its Oxford. The Army today resembles a great ponderous American corporation, but it was not always so. The Army used to be filled with officers who believed their highest calling was to lead troops into battle, not as one more Station of the Cross on their way to the E-Ring of the Pentagon, military Gethsemane; that was why they were in the Army instead of at General Dynamics. There were soldiers who studied infantry tactics with the care and intelligence that Picasso devoted to the female face, and so thoroughly that the knowledge became second nature, almost instinct. The soldier is rarely articulate on these matters, as anyone who has read a battle plan or an article in one of the military magazines can attest. These documents, though far from literature, retain a coarse authority. All soldiers know that battle is not symmetrical, it exists in its own lawless reality, unique even as it reverberates. Verdun may have its echo in Dien Bien Phu and Dien Bien Phu in Khe Sanh. But these are only echoes, not the thing itself. Hemingway’s scrupulously orchestrated retreat from Caporetto is a narrative of great power. Novels and histories are wonderful and indispensable, but they are not the thing itself.

This book is the thing itself.

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I met David Hackworth in the ruins of a base camp in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in the summer of 1966, when he was commanding a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division and I was a correspondent for The Washington Post. He was compact, with forearms the size of hams. His uniform was filthy and unadorned with any insignia save the major’s leaf. The base camp had been nearly overrun the night before and now he was exhorting his troops; and they were listening, in part because Hackworth’s use of obscenity was truly inventive. Later, describing the encounter to the writer Martha Gellhorn, I said I was struck by his enthusiasm, his magnetism, his exuberance, his invincible cheerfulness. Gellhorn hated the Vietnam War completely and without reservation but at that she nodded and smiled. Yes, she said. That was the way they were in World War II. That was the way the best of them were. It made you want to be around them.

David Hackworth is the genuine article, a soldier’s soldier, a connoisseur of combat. He prefers the word warrior and is entitled to prefer it. Combat has been his life. He enlisted in the Army at fifteen, received a battlefield commission in Korea at twenty, was four times wounded before he was twenty-one, was probably the most decorated officer in the American Army at the time of his retirement in 1971, a full colonel bound for two, conceivably three, stars had he not—But that is the subject of About Face, the most important soldier’s memoir to emerge from the Vietnam era. This is the U.S. Army from the inside, the memoir of an infantry officer who loved the institution with the indiscriminate ardor and lavish expectations of any moonstruck Romeo. He believed the recruiting posters. He believed the legends. He believed in the Army way, as opposed to the right way or the wrong way, and he wanted to become a hero, Alvin York or Audie Murphy. The enemy would be anyone who the Army told him was the enemy. He knew that barriers of class and education would keep him from the very top of the institution, but he did not want the very top. He wanted a platoon, then he wanted a company, then he wanted a battalion, and then he wanted a brigade. Someone else could be Chief of Staff; Hackworth wanted the line.

He learned his trade, as most successful line officers do, from sergeants. The postwar peacetime Army was filled with battlewise NCOs who knew the score, not from training films but from the battleground itself. Care for your men. Maintain discipline. Always set an example. You take fewer casualties attacking than retreating: Your job is not to die for your country but to make the other son of a bitch die for his country. Once engaged, give no quarter. Drill, drill, drill. Stay alert, stay alive. The sergeants were good teachers, but in Korea Hackworth saw the thing itself and knew he could master it. He understood the atmosphere of violence, meaning that he knew how to keep his head, to think in danger’s midst. In battle, the worst thing is paralysis. He mastered his own fear, and learned how to kill. He led by example, and his men followed. This book describes all that, and the men: Deboer, Aguda, many others, many dead.

This is a world so remote from the common civilian experience that the reader must remind himself that this is not some ill-conceived movie but a man’s life. Korea ended, but the career did not. Later, as captain, major, lieutenant colonel, and colonel, there were other models, the Army’s fighting elite: James Gavin and Creighton Abrams from the previous generation, Hank Emerson from his own generation. By his own account, Hackworth was not an obedient protégé, and tact was never his long suit; but his heroics in Korea were a powerful credential. He made his way up on soldierly abilities alone, learning as he went. Hackworth was appalled when General Gavin resigned from the Army in protest, but by then he understood that the headquarters Army was different from the field Army, and that both had changed in the postwar fifties. In this new Army, no one could afford to tell the truth, make an error, or admit to ignorance. When John F. Kennedy decided to commit large numbers of American advisers to South Vietnam, Hackworth volunteered at once—and was startled to be turned down. He had too much combat experience. Too much? Yes, he was told, the role of the American adviser was not to seek combat but to train the Vietnamese Army to seek combat, and therefore combat veterans were not needed, not desired. This seemed an oddly fastidious concept—war with kid gloves, let’s not dirty our hands or theirs—and of course was abandoned as the Communists continued to advance and the Vietnamese Army to collapse. There were successive tours in South Vietnam—including a remarkable stint with S. L. A. Marshall, the military writer whose work must now be examined afresh—and Hackworth’s disgust and pessimism grew with each tour. He found the Army lying to itself and to everyone else. The Pentagon seemed to be treating the war as the occasion for career management of its officers, every lieutenant colonel entitled to a battalion, every colonel to a brigade, and never mind the officer’s qualifications. Meanwhile, the war was being lost, buried in an avalanche of bogus statistics and false promises of progress. Finally, the American command initiated the cowardly and murderous foray into Cambodia, where ARVN battalions were shredded as the frightened and ill-prepared paper tigers they were. Hackworth gave his pessimistic after-action report to senior American commanders and was told to sit down and shut up. Defeatists were not welcome. The truth was unspeakable.

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His last assignment was as senior adviser to the 44th Special Tactical Zone in the South Vietnamese Delta near the Cambodian border, and it would be the final turn of the screw. On the surface, the war was being won. There were few large-scale engagements, roads were open, and terrorist activity (both sides) was down. Official reports suggested the corollary: If the Viet Cong were retreating, the ARVN must be advancing. All wrong, as Hackworth soon learned. The Communists had moved into a new phase of their struggle, and the ARVN was as ineffective as ever. But the reports were received with enthusiasm in Washington, and Hackworth was one of the first to see the grotesque irony. "It was as if the system had come full circle: these same reports, which had been in large part responsible for escalating the war, were now eagerly sought after by the Nixon administration as the ultimate smokescreen for their abandonment of the effort."

The last assignment, very far into no-man’s-land, off the map where no rules applied, culminated in the celebrated Issues and Answers interview. Broadcast from the field, it was a sensation. Hackworth disclosed the bankruptcy of American training and tactics and the incapacity of the Vietnamese Army, identified the lies and some of the liars who kept it afloat, and all but declared the war a lost cause, unwinnable. This was the simple truth, but in the pusillanimous atmosphere of 1971, Hackworth was seen as insubordinate and treacherous. But not easily dismissed. The words, after all, came not from an academic or journalist but from the man Creighton Abrams called the best battalion commander I ever saw in the United States Army.

David Hackworth always promised to write something about his life as a soldier, something that might be believed because it was firsthand material; and because he was who he was, people might pay attention. The Army brass might read it, even though they would not like it and would try to discredit it. But they would have to account for it. About Face is not a pretty or orderly story, and it takes us farther into the quotidian life of the professional soldier than anything I have ever read; as a manual to the military tactics of the Vietnam War, it is without equal. Reading this life, you wonder how anyone survived it.

Ward Just

Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts

September 1988

PART I

1 6 FEBRUARY 1951

We called him Combat because on training maneuvers he’d go up the goddamn hill standing up and shooting. The whole platoon harassed him for not using cover, but on the next problem he’d do the same thing. Hack was an eager guy. He did things—he didn’t sit back and wait.

Captain Steve Prazenka, USA, Ret.

Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Trieste United States Troops (TRUST), 1947–50

WHEN I first saw them, about a thousand yards to our front, the enemy looked like little black ants racing from the village toward snow-covered hills. It was a clear, cloudless morning; the temperature hovered around zero as the tanks kept rolling, closing on the ants and the hills set astride the road dead ahead.

My squad was riding piggyback on the lead tank. It was no honor being first in the grim parade; we’d already ravaged the tank’s toolbox and knocked off some rations to eat on the way, and now our only comfort was the motor of the M46, which belched welcome heat over our near-frozen bodies.

The tank commander relayed Lieutenant Land’s order to dismount. I got the guys off like a shot and hit the ground running as the tank rolled on beside us. But when I looked behind me, I saw that the rest of the 3d Platoon had not dismounted. Maybe I’d heard wrong. Maybe I was just overeager. But it’s damn near impossible for infantrymen to reboard a moving tank, so there was no choice but to keep running, and hope I hadn’t blown it too badly with the Lieutenant.

I didn’t see the ants again for what seemed a lifetime, but I sure as hell knew where they were. In an instant, the familiar roar of the tanks was drowned out by the deafening sound of incoming—machine gun, mortar, artillery, and self-propelled antitank (AT) fire. Like a buzz saw, the deadly cross fire was cutting into my platoon.

There were at least a dozen enemy machine guns on the high ground on both sides of the road. My guys, still running alongside our maneuvering tank, were totally shielded; the other squads, on the exposed decks of their tanks, were hard hit. By the time we made it to the side of a rice-paddy wall and set up a base of fire, most of what was left of 3d Platoon was scattered across the frozen ground.

The tanks pulled off the road and rolled into position on line. Once there, they froze. Earlier, in the assembly area, a tank commander had told me his unit, the 64th Tank Battalion, hadn’t seen much hard combat. I believed him: as soon as they were fired upon, these tankers became paralyzed. They plumb forgot all their training and just sat there in those great big armored hulls, while the enemy went on throwing everything at us but the mess-hall wok.

I jumped on the back of the platoon leader’s tank, and thumped on the hatch with the butt of my rifle. The lieutenant opened the hatch a crack. Hey, Lieutenant, I yelled, get some fire going at the enemy! Get the big gun going! Get the machine guns going!

The Lieutenant was not with it. It seemed as though he had no comprehension of the fix we were in. Slugs were splatting hard on the side of the tank. The self-propelled AT fire, which was screaming down the valley, dug deep furrows all around us, and yet the tanks still sat there silently, like big, fat clay ducks at a shooting gallery. Sergeant, the Lieutenant finally said, in a shell-shocked kind of daze, look… you see that out there on the ice? Yes, I saw: it was a pile cap, a little fur ball on the ice amid my platoon’s dead and wounded, the bullets and the blood. That’s my cap, he said. Would you get it for me?

I considered shooting the sorry son of a bitch then and there, climbing inside his tank and taking command. Fortunately, reason prevailed: I just grabbed him and shook him until he looked as if he was back to the real world. Then I instructed him to have three tanks concentrate on the self-propelled AT fire to our front, and use the others to start placing main-gun fire on the hills. To give him a bit of encouragement, I manned the tank’s. 50-caliber turret machine gun and blasted one of the hills myself, until I’d used up all the ammo and the commander got his men into action.

Once the 90-mm guns got going, we were on our way to gaining fire superiority. The amount of incoming decreased as the tankers started to remember why they were there. But the tank commanders stayed buttoned up inside their turrets. No one was using the .50 calibers. I just couldn’t believe it—eight inches of steel between them and the chaos outside, yet they didn’t have it in them to help the sun come out for the guys stopping slugs with their field jackets. I went from tank to tank, pounding on the hatches and blasting away on each of the .50s until all the ammo was exhausted. This little exercise had its effect; the tank commanders got the word and started doing what they should have been doing all along. When no further spoon-feeding was required, I returned to my platoon.

There were dead and wounded everywhere. Slugs were ricocheting off the ice; we could see sparks where they hit. Jim Parker’s 2d Platoon had successfully silenced an enemy machine gun to our left, so the pressure was off enough for us to get our wounded behind the protection of the tanks and paddy walls, where they could be patched up. Our progress was hampered, though, because the tank crews kept moving their tanks. They didn’t stop to think they were exposing our wounded all over again; they were too busy trying to save their own armor-coated skins. I told the tank lieutenant, whom I’d come to view—and treat accordingly—as a recruit at Fort Knox, that the next time a tank moved and exposed our guys I’d fire a 3.5 bazooka right up its ass. There was no more movement.

I saw a soldier prone on the ice. He’d been there a long time; I thought he was dead. But then I saw movement, and rushed out to get him. My God, I thought, it’s Deboer.

Private Henry C. Deboer had been with George Company since early in the war. He was one of the few survivors from the original 3d Platoon, basically because in those first hard months of combat he had not seen one good firefight. He had an uncanny sixth sense: he could always tell when the platoon was in for a major bloodletting, and invariably he’d find an excuse to be somewhere else. Normally that excuse was going on sick call, which by regulation he was allowed to do, and you couldn’t stop him even though you knew the only thing that was wrong with him was a chronic case of cowardice. Deboer himself even admitted he was a coward, and we hated him for it. He was an outcast from the platoon; we even had a little song about him, which we’d all sing in unison: "Out of the dark, dreary Korean countryside comes the call of the Deboer bird: Sick call, sick call, sick call." He’d pulled his stunt only yesterday, as we were saddling up for this very operation. He’d sensed the bloodletting all right, but hadn’t figured that the foggy overcast covering the battlefield would not lift and the attack would be postponed. He’d returned from the doc last night (with a clean bill of health) most surprised to see us; the rest of the platoon took great pleasure in the fact that his malingering little ass would be in the thick of things in the morning.

Now Deboer was ashen-faced, hit in the chest or gut—I didn’t know, there was a lot of blood—and well into shock. I knew he wasn’t going to make it. Come on, Deboer, you’re going to be fine! You’ll be all right, I said, giving him the old pep talk as I grabbed his jacket collar and started sliding him across the ice.

But Deboer said, No, Sarge! Just leave me… you’re going to get hit! Just leave me, Sarge… Then suddenly he groaned: Sarge, I shit my pants… and that was it. He was gone. I left him and ran back.

Deboer, in death, became one of the great heroes of our outfit. It was true he’d never been anything in his Army life but a coward, but he’d died right—he died like a man. He didn’t say, Take care of me; he said, Leave me. Take care of yourself. And when I told the other guys the story, old Deboer became a legend in the platoon.

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The road ran north-south, and we were on the east side of it. The balance of G Company was on the attack, maneuvering to secure the high ground to the north and west. My platoon, or what was left of it, was the fix ’em element—tying down the enemy while providing a base of fire for Parker’s and Phil Gilchrist’s platoons. After we got organized, I had a moment to look around. I saw my platoon leader, Lieutenant Land, sort of crouched down, leaning against the rice-paddy wall, observing the whole action. John Land was a good man; a WW II vet and former G Company NCO, he was one of the few battlefield commissions in the 27th. Isn’t he a cool customer, I thought to myself now, just watching this whole thing and taking it all in. Because really that was about the only thing you could do at a time like this: stay cool, stay down, and establish fire superiority as best you could.

I examined what we had left in terms of a fighting force. Tennessee Mitchell, Delbert Bell, old Deboer—there were seven dead altogether, and about a dozen wounded. The platoon sergeant was gone and the assistant platoon sergeant nowhere in sight. It seemed that all that was left of 3d Platoon was the balance of my squad, bits and pieces of the other two, and a light-machine-gun team. I ran over to the Lieutenant to ask for instructions. When I got there I realized the reason Lieutenant Land was so cool was that he was dead. He’d caught a slug right between the eyes. The blood had poured down his face and chest, filled up the eyepieces of his binoculars, and frozen there. I took the binoculars and slipped the radio from his dead radio operator’s back. I called Captain Michaely, our company commander, and gave him a situation report. He said I was now in charge, that we were to continue tying down the enemy and get the wounded out, in that order of priority.

Lieutenant Gilchrist’s 1st Platoon was having a hell of a time. Their attack was being held up by fire from a hornet’s nest of well-concealed enemy automatic-weapons positions. Just as we’d gotten the wounded under control, one of our guys who’d been doing some scouting spotted North Korean fighting positions on the other side of the dike 1st Platoon was attacking. He motioned me over to have a look. Sure enough, at least a platoon was dug in there, almost in the shadow of the tanks. They were so close that the tanks’ main guns couldn’t depress low enough to hit them, nor could their antitank weapons hit our tanks. It was a Mexican standoff, but not for long. All right, who’s going with me? I asked.

I will, said Van Mieter, our platoon medic, a stud of a guy who had as great a reputation as a fighter as he did as a doc.

While the others laid down a good base of fire, the doc and I each threw two frag grenades over the dike. When they exploded we leaped through the smoke, landing front and center of the enemy. It was eyeball-to-eyeball: the two of us facing at least thirty dazed, wounded, or dead Communists. The enemy appeared to be leaderless—they were certainly in a state of shock—and we cleaned up the position with ease, using rifles and bayonets. Then two more enemy soldiers appeared out of the smoke and confusion dragging a .57-caliber antitank buffalo gun. We were no more than ten feet apart. I leveled my M-1 and was about to shoot when I looked down and saw that the bolt was back—my weapon was empty and it wasn’t exactly the time for reloading. I lunged forward with bayonet at on guard, shouting, Tao zhong! The enemy threw up their hands.

The Chinese word for surrender was probably the only one I knew; I’d filed it away in my brain when we were up north. I must admit I learned it thinking that someone would be saying it to me, but it didn’t matter now—there they stood, with burp guns still hanging around their necks, a buffalo gun at their feet, and me with an empty rifle. The funny thing was that these guys were Korean, not Chinese, and chances were they hadn’t understood what I’d said anyway. On the other hand, in combination with that long, razor-sharp bayonet pointed at them, they probably would have surrendered if I’d given the order in Swahili. In any event, we took their weapons and turned the POWs over to our men on the other side of the dike. Then the doc and I continued mopping up. In numbers and in firepower, these guys certainly should have outgunned what was left of 3d Platoon; from the number of bodies, buffalo guns, and other AT weapons we found, we concluded that we’d knocked off an antitank platoon that had been as green and scared as our tankers. The only difference was, of course, that these North Koreans would never tell the story of their baptism of fire.

By the time we rejoined the platoon, my guys had looted the two prisoners. The only real treasure was a U.S.-made Waltham pocket watch, which the guys gave to me. It became my 6 February souvenir. None of us spoke Korean, so I tasked PFC Charles to take the POWs back to Captain Michaely for interrogation. I was really pleased we’d nailed them; prisoners are the best source of battlefield information, and with the fight still going on full tilt around us, it’d be useful to find out what the hell was happening in the enemy camp.

The 1st and 2d platoons of George were fighting hard to take the high ground. Navy Corsairs were working the enemy over with napalm and strafing runs. Cut off between mine and Gilchrist’s platoons were enemy who’d been bypassed, so I took half a dozen of our guys and we went up the hill to do some hunting.

The North Koreans were in cleverly concealed, well-dug bunkers stuffed with straw for warmth. The pine-covered hill was a maze of seemingly unrelated positions, which we slowly worked through in two-man teams. Fire in the hole! was shouted again and again as we grenaded bunker after bunker, one man providing covering fire as the other edged close enough to flip in a frag. The enemy didn’t fight back; they stayed in the bottom of their holes like trapped moles. It didn’t take long before we ran out of frag grenades. A field expedient was quickly devised: we stripped tracer slugs from the machine-gun belt and clipped them for our M-1s. With one man covering, his partner would slip up to a hole and snap off a tracer or two into the position. The red-hot slugs would ignite the straw inside, and when the defender came up coughing, he’d be shot between the horns. (Gary Cooper wiped out dozens of German soldiers in Sergeant York by luring them out with a turkey call; if it was good enough for Sergeant York and Hollywood, it was good enough for us on 6 February 1951.) We moved from hole to hole, systematically burning the enemy out, until the hilltop above us suddenly exploded with gunfire. The Reds were counterattacking. As Gilchrist’s platoon fought them off only six feet from the crest of the hill, we beat feet back to the safety of our rice-paddy wall.

Paddy walls, whose purpose in more peaceful times was irrigation control, were dirt walls about a foot thick and about three feet high—perfect cover from most direct-fire weapons. Infantrymen loved them. Now, leaning against my safe paddy wall (even as 1st Platoon fought off another counterattack with the help of the 2d, which could observe the forward slope of Gilchrist’s hill and provide warning of the enemy’s intention) I realized I was starving. I opened a can of C rations with my trusty P-38 and dug right in.

I started at the top of the can: big chunks of congealed fat, under which lay beef and potatoes, frozen rock-hard. About this time an enemy sniper started firing along the top of the rice-paddy wall. It was harassing fire only; no one got hurt, but it got on all our nerves far more, even, than the larger battle still raging around us. I had just gotten down to the meat and was about to take my first bite when—zzzppt!—a slug creased a furrow in the top of the wall right above my head and showered my rations with debris. I scooped it out. I was about to try another bite when—zzzppt!—another slug, same place, did the same thing. By the third time, that was it. I was pissed off. I’m going to get that sniper. Who’s going with me? Ray Wells, an ace machine gunner and good old country boy from West Virginia, volunteered.

We followed the paddy wall to a drainage ditch that took us behind the North Korean antitank positions. The plan was simple: to get to the right rear of the sniper, shoot the son of a bitch, and go back and finish my Cs.

The ditch had an L-shaped turn. We stopped just shy of it, and I inched forward to have a quick peek: three Koreans manning a machine gun were lying in the prone about ten feet away, not looking in our direction. I slipped back to Wells, whispering that I’d take the first guy, he’d take the third, and we’d double up on the gunner in the middle. We stepped out in the ditch. The North Koreans looked up, but Wells and I were the last thing they ever saw. I knew they were dead; we were so close that I could hear the slugs thumping home through their padded jackets. We jumped over them and continued on our way.

With Wells covering my ass, I came up behind a little tree at the top of the ditch—ideal concealment for a quick look-see. After a few seconds’ scan, I spotted the sniper on the hill. He was in a bunker about a hundred yards away on my left flank, and I could clearly see the side of his head and his Soviet SKS rifle. I ducked down. I didn’t want to take a chance on Kentucky windage, so I adjusted my M-1 rifle sights down four clicks and got into a firing position. I had the sniper’s head sitting right on top of my front sight, but just as I was about to squeeze the trigger I heard machine-gun slugs snapping over my head, and then the weapon’s report. Oh, shit, I thought, someone’s seen me. For all I knew it could have been one of our tankers—the slugs were coming from that direction—maybe they hadn’t gotten the word we were out there. So I started to go down. But as I went down I felt the top of my head explode. I’d caught a slug.

Like most good Wolfhounds, I wasn’t wearing a helmet—helmets were a pain in the ass unless there was lots of artillery and mortar fire coming in (in which case they became as essential as air). The slug ripped through my fur pile cap and propelled me from the top of the ditch as though I’d been poleaxed by Paul Bunyan. I don’t know if I lost consciousness or not, but I do know I was stunned, with four-alarm sirens ringing in both ears. Wells thought I was dead and took off down the ditch. I couldn’t blame him—he thought he was all alone out there behind enemy lines. Meanwhile, I tried to focus on what had happened.

Blood, really thick blood, was pumping out of my head. The first thing I did was ask myself my name, rank, and serial number: David Haskell Hackworth, Sergeant, RA19242907 came the automatic response, which made me decide that my head must still be okay, even if my ass was in the worst crack ever. I started crawling down the ditch. I had to crawl because the North Koreans on the high ground knew they had an intruder in their midst. I stayed low on the enemy’s side; slugs were spraying the ditch fast and furious, but thumping up against the other wall. I crawled until I reached the machine-gun crew Wells and I had knocked off.

Now I was faced with a dilemma. If I jumped over them, I’d become exposed to the enemy fire coming from the hill. If I crawled over them, one of them might still be alive—and the longer I looked the more my confused head convinced me that one of them was alive—and he’d kill me. I couldn’t shoot them because when I got hit I’d dropped my rifle. So I just stared at them, like a dumb recruit, wondering what to do. I pulled my trench knife out of my boot. Very carefully, I crawled over one of them, waiting for him to move. Crawled over the next one, waiting for him to move. Then I crawled over the third guy the same way, and slipped on, like a snake, down the ditch until it was high enough for me to crouch, then high enough to stand up and run. And the whole time, I was singing.

Whoever said there aren’t any atheists on the battlefield was dead right. Often when we’d be sitting around our little fires, one of the guys in the platoon would play his guitar and we would sing. The songs were all religious ones, like Down By the Riverside, where we’d be laying down our swords and shields, or Please, dear Jesus, hear my plea, just a closer walk with Thee—but they were also songs of great comradeship. And a most magic feeling would always pour out when we sang, a feeling that 3d Platoon, our platoon, was our family, our whole life. And somehow between God and our brothers, we were going to make it through.

So as I pounded down this ditch, I was singing Just a Closer Walk with Thee, with deep feeling—Ella Fitzgerald, look out. To my mind I was really talking to God. I was talking to The Man. So I’m singing and running, blood’s pouring out of my head—and then I remembered I didn’t have my rifle. What a rotten example I had set. Good NCOs don’t screw up like that; only a dumbshit of a soldier loses his rifle. So I stopped singing and started chewing my ass as I ran down that ditch.

Maybe it was because I was thinking about my lack of professionalism. Maybe it was just a second-nature thing from my training. Or maybe it was a sixth sense, I don’t know. But seconds before I was home free (Just a few feet more, I told myself, just around the corner)—I stopped. Hey, Third Platoon! It’s Hackworth, I shouted. I’m coming in!

Then I turned the corner. I found myself looking down the throat of Corporal Wesley Morgan’s mean-looking Browning automatic rifle. Man, you were so loud coming down that ditch I thought at least a platoon of gooks was on the march! Wells told me you got it. If you hadn’t called out I would have mowed you down.

2 BROWN SHOES

When I first met The Hack, he was a fine soldier, fresh from service with TRUST—possibly our sharpest military formation, then occupying Trieste in Italy. He was the epitome of a TRUST trooper—sharp, dedicated, eager to learn, proud of the Army. Usually these young soldiers die right away. The Hack was a volunteer for infantry service in Korea. The rest that follows, of course, is his punishment for such stupidity.

Lieutenant Colonel Phillip J. Gilchrist, USA, Ret.

Platoon Leader/Company Commander 27th Infantry Regiment, Korea, 1950–51

ON 20 May 1946, I was on the corner of Main and Hill streets in Ocean Park, California, waiting for a bus. Al Hewitt, my best friend and childhood mentor, suddenly came running up, brandishing some magazine, which he breathlessly thrust in my face. Look at it! he demanded.

On the cover was an Airborne constabulary soldier in Berlin. The trooper was wearing a knockout of a uniform, complete with a very jazzy yellow scarf around his neck. His helmet had a big C painted on the front, and a yellow band around it, which tied in perfectly with the scarf. It was a great uniform, with the whole look made complete by the two beautiful blond fräuleins the guy had perched on his knees. Al said, That’s the army of occupation in Germany, Hack! We’ve got to join up!

I didn’t need any persuading; the only problem as I saw it was where to go to enlist. I’d been trying to get into one service or another for the last three years, and by now the sergeants at the Santa Monica recruiting station knew me on a first-name basis. I was still underage even if Al was not, so we hopped the first bus into Los Angeles to join up there.

Somehow we got separated on the way to the physicals. Armed with my phony ID papers (I’d gotten them the year before, when Al and I joined the merchant marine), I kept on going, and ended up in a room with an officer and a flag. I pledged allegiance to the flag, and then, kind of before I knew it, I was a soldier in the U.S. Army. The officer asked me when I wanted to start basic training, now or next week. Now, I said, remembering with a fifteen-year-old’s lust those blond fräuleins on another trooper’s knees.

There were three or four buses waiting at the ramp outside the L.A. induction center. I checked them all to see if Al had come out yet. He had not, so I got us a couple of seats and squared myself away. Recruits kept trickling out of the building and into the buses; what seemed like a very long time passed, and still Al was nowhere to be seen. He turned up just as the buses were about to pull away. I begged our driver to hold on. Come on, Al! I shouted. We’re leaving right now! We’re going to Germany!

Can’t go! he called back.

Why not? I screamed.

Four-F! he yelled. Got a punctured eardrum!

So long, Al.

Sadly, by the time I finished training, American Airborne troops had been kicked out of Berlin; the word was that occupation U.S. paratrooper style was too much even for a country that had seen its fair share of destruction. My destination was now Italy, and when the troopship (which wasn’t a troopship at all, but a freighter designed for bulk supplies) finally landed at Leghorn, twenty-four hundred troops, who’d been packed in like sardines all the way from New York, spilled onto a beach still studded with mines.

We stayed in a huge warehouse at the water’s edge. It was more like an airplane hangar than anything else, and there were probably two thousand guys sleeping in there, in makeshift beds. All the windows in the place had been broken out by the troops we were replacing: the second Great War’s combat men, celebrating because they were finally going home.

Wild parties, wild drinking, and whores everywhere. Whores in the barracks, whores on the beach—even if nobody else did, the whores knew where the mines were buried. And wherever you went, little kids would say, Hey, GI, you got chewing gum? You got chocolate? It was just like in the movies.

The outfit I was assigned to, the 752d Tank Battalion, was more of the same, including the whores. The only difference was the vets here were not quite on their way out of town. Everything was loose and everything was wild, but these vets, the majority of whom had fought from Africa to Sicily to Italy, were still lean, mean, combat-ready troops—they just didn’t have time for garrison-style discipline. It was not uncommon, for example, to be awakened in the middle of the night by a drunk off-duty trooper running through the barracks firing his weapon, or to hear one of his buddies matching him, shot for shot, just for the hell of it outside. All in all, it was some violent world I found myself in—nothing like I’d expected—but with wonderful characters, veterans who could spin drunken tales until the wee hours of the morning about some little way they had beaten the system, or the signorinas they’d conquered as they fought up Italy’s rugged spine. They rarely talked about combat, though, and after a very short time we new replacements stopped asking. Maybe it was just part of the role, but the old soldiers went silent on the horrors of war. It was as though they belonged to a secret fraternity, and we, the pink-cheeked unenlightened, were—in a word—outsiders.

But there were other horrors of war that we saw every day, and couldn’t have gotten away from if we’d tried. Al Hewitt and I had dreamed of pretty fräuleins on our knees; Italy after World War II was dark and desperate, and unlike anything I could ever have imagined. It was like a cloudy day every day, and all the people were hurting. Even the landscape seemed to be hurting: the houses were all blown down, the bridges blown up, the fields ripped apart, and nothing was growing. There was no money and no food. Old ladies in black dresses and black scarves stood at the end of the chow line, picking through the garbage cans for enough scraps to feed their families. Young boys walked the train tracks in the hopes of scrounging the odd piece of coal to eke some warmth out of the family hearth. (When I guarded the tracks, I pretended not to hear the bits of coal clanking into empty metal buckets behind me, and made a big show of turning around to give the kids time to hide.) This grim aftermath of war would be forever etched in my fifteen-year-old mind, but, equally, I would always remember the people’s will, their sheer determination to survive and start again.

---

Gradually most of the WW II warriors went back to the States, and the postwar wild-West feeling of lawlessness went, too. It had been great fun for a kid to be part of the hell-for-leather spirit that made up the 752d (the Seven-Five-Deuce), but like the tightening of a screw, one turn at a time, each day the unit became more military, the who gives a damn attitude of the remaining 752d combat leaders and troopers replaced by the exacting discipline of the peacetime Army.

For the next four years I learned my trade—one year with the recon company of the tank battalion in the Po Valley, and three more with Trieste United States Troops (TRUST), the illustrious unit whose five thousand handpicked members Walter Winchell called the chrome-plated soldiers of Europe. We worked hard during those years—long, merciless days of training, repeating, repeating, repeating until we got it right—our transformation into soldiers inspired and monitored by those battle-savvy NCOs, who well knew that discipline and tactical proficiency on the battlefield were direct results of discipline and combat skills instilled on the parade and training grounds. At night it was down on our hands and knees, all of us hand-waxing the barracks floors until we had enough money to chip in and buy a buffer; you could eat off those floors (and if you couldn’t, your platoon sergeant would just make you do them again), just as you could almost be blinded by the brass belt buckles and brown boots that each of us wore, polished every night to a dazzling finish. The only way out of these activities was sick call, but rarely was it used as an excuse: it took as much effort to see the doc (you had to strip your bed, cram all your perfectly pressed clothes into a duffel bag, see the supply sergeant and then the First Sergeant—not to mention the lion’s share of a month’s pay you’d spend having clothes re-pressed when you came back) as it did to continue on with the normal routine.

Punishment was meted out by a process known as NCO justice: for crimes such as a uniform of less than starched perfection, a bed that didn’t bounce a quarter, or even a mildly insubordinate smirk, the sentence could range from fifty push-ups to double-timing around the parade field holding a 9.5-pound M-1 rifle over your head, yelling, I’m a shithead! I’m a shithead! until you collapsed. We rarely saw an officer above our platoon leader lieutenant (and he was seldom with the troops because of administrative duties), but no one seemed too concerned about it; above and below on the chain of command, it was well recognized that as fathers, teachers, older brothers, and chief tormentors, in Trieste the NCO corps had no equal.

Despite our spit-and-polish perfection (and the never-ending demand for same), the American soldiers occupying Trieste and the surrounding region were not just parade-ground troops. My first assignment, Company D, was the reconnaissance unit of the 752d; my last, the Intelligence and Reconnaissance (I&R) Platoon, was the eyes and ears of the TRUST (351st) Regiment. In both outfits, our job was to patrol the Italian-Yugoslavian border regularly, from the port city of Trieste to the Austrian border to the north. The reason for our vigilance was simply that although the war was over, Italy had not yet seen peace.

At the end of WW II, Yugoslavian partisans (led by Marshal Tito, who had become Yugoslavia’s prime minister in March 1945) had come rushing toward Trieste as part of an attempt to regain some of the territory that had belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian empire prior to the First World War. These Communists had been thwarted by units of the U.S. 10th Mountain and 88th Infantry (Blue Devil) divisions, and by British forces, as well, who moved up to occupy the contested region along a boundary called the Morgan Line. Trieste itself, a city that had been handed over to Italy by Austria in 1920 as a prize of war, was probably the greatest thorn in the Yugoslavs’ (or Jugs, as we called them) side, and after a two-year standoff along the Morgan Line, in 1947 the two nations signed a peace treaty that created the Free Territory of Trieste and divided it into zones. Two were occupied, respectively, by American and British troops (the third by Tito’s boys), and the Jugs were less than pleased with the new arrangement. Tito felt that because Yugoslavia had fought on the right side during the war and Mussolini’s Italy on the wrong, the Jugs deserved Trieste this time. Consequently, the postwar Allied troops, who’d been on a war footing in Italy from the word go, remained so. And although there were few full-on confrontations, while the Allies maintained a defensive posture in Trieste and along the Italian-Yugoslavian border, the Communists nickeled and dimed us with small-scale guerrilla operations.

The Communists were the enemy—the Cold War was already in full swing. Winston Churchill had given his famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, predicting that an iron curtain would come slamming down over all of Eastern Europe; we on the ground could see the enemy with our own eyes, as day and night we watched them watch us from tall, wooden towers along the border. What the enemy was about was brought home clearly at the Army’s weekly Troop Information Program, where films and lectures depicted the Communists as monstrous, lumbering, savage, stupid beasts who would eat little kids if given half a chance. Know your enemy, we were told; we learned to know them, and we knew to hate them, which I thought was all pretty good since the day might come when I’d have to kill them.

Still, the closest I ever came to chambering a round in all four years I was in Italy was on 16 September 1947—Reunification Day—the day a Yugoslav regiment marched right down a road crossing the Jug-Trieste border, intent on passing through American and British lines to reach their zone of the newly divided city.I

After being told once that they could not pass through our lines, the Jugs withdrew, only to return to the same American outpost reinforced to the tune of two thousand men. West Point Lieutenant William Van Dyke Ochs, Jr., my former platoon leader (and at this time B Company’s executive officer [XO] and acting CO), headed them off at the pass, firmly refusing to yield to the pressure of a Yugoslav colonel who threatened force if not allowed to proceed. The stakes were high as Ochs played out his bluff poker hand—his immediate force at the outpost was less than a dozen men.

Meanwhile, everyone else in the 351st had gone on alert, thinking we were about to go to war. I was with the section of tanks that raced to the scene, but Lieutenant Ochs’s initial cool had prevailed, and by the time we got there and took up battle positions, the incident was well on the way to blowing over, with higher military authorities on both sides conferring about a better way to solve the problem. Ochs himself became an instant hero, and the scuttlebutt concerning his act of calm but forceful battlefield diplomacy was one that stayed in my memory for a long, long time.

My own experience in Company B had been short, basically because the minute I was assigned there I raised hell until I could get out. I’m a recon man, I’d said again and again to anyone who would listen (and, at sixteen, I’d just say it louder if they appeared to be ignoring me), I’m no dumb groundpounder. I was a real troublemaker, but the way I saw it was that the Army and I had a contract: I’d signed on not as an infantryman but as a recon man—Airborne recon, actually; I’d taken Armored reconnaissance basic and I’d loved my year zooming around in my little M24 light tank in the 752d. You can’t keep me here! I’d yell at my rifle platoon sergeant, even as he gave me the worst details and most painful close and sustained discipline an NCO could dish out.

I think I was transferred only in order to shut me up, and even then I didn’t get what I wanted. In fairness, that was only because what I wanted didn’t exist; the closest thing to Armored anything in TRUST was the 15th Tank Company (the oldest tank unit in the Army, predating even WW I), and that’s where I was sent. My experience in the 752d had taught me absolutely nothing about medium tanks, and the 15th’s WW II Shermans (souped up with 76-mm main guns) were huge steel-monster mysteries to me. I learned quickly—of necessity—because I was assigned as assistant driver on a tank commanded by the meanest sergeant in the entire U.S. Army. Sergeant Dillard Oller of Harlan County, Kentucky, gave his gunner corrections in phrases like down a crack and left a cunt hair. He was the second-best asskicker in the business (my platoon sergeant, Jesse O. Giddens, placed number one), and he kicked mine twenty-four hours a day until I loved and took care of his tank as though it were my first car. Sergeant Oller’s 1947 expectations were actually those of 1930 Regular Army soldierly perfection; the style of discipline required to meet this ideal took some getting used to, however, and until I got into the swing of things I thought I was in prison. But it was the same throughout the tank company: I knew one trooper who’d spent time in the TRUST stockade, and when he came back he said that as bad as the stockade was—and it was bad—in terms of unrelenting discipline, high standards, and tough soldiering, the 15th was even worse.

Or better, depending on how you looked at it. Over the next eighteen months with the tank company, I became a driver and a gunner corporal—and even then, if I’d missed a fifty-five-gallon drum at twelve hundred yards on the second shot it would have been an immediate farewell to those two beautiful stripes. The rationale was simple: mistakes on the training field will be mistakes on the battlefield, and mistakes on the battlefield lead to men’s deaths. The tank NCOs, many of whom were pre-WW II Horse Cav Regulars, were like gods—they were perfect, and demanded the same from us, instantly. They cut absolutely no slack as they worked overtime molding us into soldiers, in the process establishing standards that would remain with and in us for years to come. No detail escaped their eyes, and when (inevitably) one of us troops screwed up, we paid dearly for it. But the price was never as high as what we gained as a result: first, a respect and appreciation for details (the basic building blocks, which, if neglected, can foul up the works completely), and second, an incredible boost to our morale when, wonder of wonders, we got it right.

General of the Army George Catlett Marshall once said, Morale is a state of mind. It is steadfastness and courage and hope… confidence and zeal and loyalty… élan, esprit de corps, and determination. Morale, he said, is staying power, the spirit which endures to the end—the will to win. These words could have been the motto of the 15th Tank, and for that matter, of all of TRUST, a command that really did live twenty Regular Army years behind the times. In truth, we were probably the last bastion of the Old Army: an isolated unit on the Adriatic Sea, off by ourselves we remained untainted by the problems that were already developing in the postwar Army of a war-weary world. In TRUST, however it may have been anyplace else, every day was a new challenge, and every day brought a new achievement.

As a corporal I was assigned on temporary duty (TDY) to the regimental training unit, a provisional organization that trained new replacements right off the boat. Lieutenant Roland Carrier, commander of the Regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon, was our provisional training officer; during the course of the program, he asked me if I’d come to his outfit as a squad leader. He said there’d be another stripe in it for me somewhere down the track; it was one of those offers I wouldn’t have dreamed of refusing (I mean, I didn’t even care that the I&R Platoon was a groundpounder unit), and I beat feet over there as soon as I could.

---

If TRUST troops were proud (and they were), and if TRUST troops were disciplined (and they most certainly were), then the I&R TRUST troops were the proudest of the proud, the most disciplined of the disciplined. Our platoon sergeant, Steve Prazenka, was the ultimate taskmaster; he quickly became my mentor and my hero, the one I wanted to be like when I grew up and had a whole bunch of stripes of my own. Guided by his firm hand, the I&R Platoon was an outstanding unit—without a doubt, the best in the regiment. If you learn it right, you’ll do it right the rest of your life, Prazenka would growl as the endless repetition of one thing or another began to take its toll on his charges. If you learn it wrong, you’ll do it wrong, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to learn to do it right. Thanks to him we learned it right the first time around. We learned about weapons—ours and the enemy’s—how to disassemble, assemble, and fire them. We spent days training in the woods, learning about camouflage, woodcraft, creeping, scouting, and observing; we became experts in what Prazenka called snooping and pooping, all under his watchful eye. We had an hour’s close-order drill every day, using the drills of the thirties, and if Prazenka didn’t like the way we did them, he’d turn back to the old field manual (which read, Close-order drill is the foundation of all discipline) and throw another hour’s worth on top of us. Holding a 9.5-pound M-1 rifle at right shoulder arms isn’t exactly a breeze at any time, and often by the time the Sergeant got through with us, our right hands would be locked stiff in the M-1 grip position for hours, somehow not getting the word that the weapon wasn’t there anymore.

The importance of close-order drill could not be overestimated; the discipline it instilled was that which would maintain order on a chaotic battlefield. You’re in a life-or-death situation out there, Prazenka would say. When you hear an order, you don’t respond in ten seconds or ten minutes. You respond NOW, unless you want to get yourself or your buddy blown in half. And I don’t want any ‘Simon Says’ shit either. When I say move, move! When I say stop, stop. When I say knock out that machine gun, you knock out that machine gun. I don’t want you to think about it. Just do it.

Prazenka made out the training schedule; we marched to the tune he played and loved him for it. He commanded our respect—effortlessly, it seemed. He was twenty-two years old and to us he’d been through it all. An I&R man from basic training onward, he’d been with the 28th (Bloody Bucket) Division I&R in WW II, and was captured (after a painful cat-and-mouse game with the Nazis) deep behind the shattered U.S. lines during the Battle of the Bulge. He was just a total pro—the finest, fairest platoon sergeant who ever came down the track—who knew as much about soldiering as an Alabama Bible-bashing preacher knows about the Good Book. He could double-time ten miles first thing in the morning regardless of what he’d drunk the night before; sometimes he’d come roaring into our barracks at 0500, still loaded to the eyeballs from a wild night’s partying, shouting, Out of those sacks, boys—let go of your cocks and grab your socks, it’s time to go for a run! and off we’d go. Usually it was just five or six miles, but on special occasions (if we bugged him enough) we’d run up to the town of Prosecco—about nine miles round-trip—to try to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend Anna. The first time we’d gone

Reviews for About Face

[Peter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was captivated by the book less from a personal account of his military experience which was interesting but more from a fascination with bureaucracy of large organizations and the motivations of individuals to succeed at the cost of the very thing that their job is about. Coming from an organization where the reports took 4 times as long as the action we were reporting, I found Hackworth's description of the failures of organizational leadership a great case study. I also found his descriptions of the personalities that succeeded and failed in a large organization fascinating and almost universal. The search for glory rather than doing your job and allowing the praise to come from a job well done. I wish I read this book sooner in my career because, while it wouldn't have improved anything, it would have let me know that some of seems absurd is normal "leadership" behavior in large organizations.

[jespercfs2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit long, I thought at the time I read it. (Actually I did not finish it) Maybe I should give it a second try . . . .

[hiromatsuo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A serious autobiography and war(s) memoir. About Face is the defining book on Colonel David Hackworth. Coming in at just under 1000 pages, this tome surprisingly reads fast. I read "after" having read Steel My Soldiers' Hearts, and I can definitely say that it gives a much broader and more complete picture of this controversial man.Hackworth makes it clear that he joined the military for the adventure. Joining the Army at 15 just as WWII concluded, Hack served in Italy in an occupation capacity, but with the TRUST troops, whose exacting standards would cement his views on soldiering for the rest of his life. Jump forward to the 1950s, see Hack serving in Korea. During this time, he begins to see develop his views on leadership and battlefield combat. Furthermore, he receives a battlefield commission during the war there as well. At many times, Hack viewed the Korean War in the same way he viewed the Vietnam War. As a war directed by the staff weenies who still dream of fighting WWII style battles in unsuitable terrain and against an enemy that doesn't play by their rules.After Korea, Hack obviously had serious trouble transitioning into the peacetime military. Assigned to staff jobs and other positions he didn't want, Hack certainly was not a "by-the-book" kind of officer. As the Cold War started and the Army placed more emphasis on nuclear weapons, Hack saw the infantry constantly being given the short straw. By the time of Vietnam, Hack would serve with the famous 101st Airborne, do a tour with Army historian SLA Marshall, command the 4th infantry battalion, and finally serve as an advisor the ARVN troops. As time went on, Hackworth slowly became more and more fed-up with the ticket-punchers and empire builders that he constantly saw running the military (and by extent, the Vietnam War). It all culminated in a national interview where he basically blew the whistle on Vietnam and the inadequate state of things in the Army at the time. Subsequently he was ostracized, hunted, and drummed out of the Army (graciously allowed to retire).I can definitely sympathize with Hackworth's frustrations regarding bureaucracy. To a by-the-book man, Hackworth is a nightmare. Seemingly insubordinate, rebellious, and selfish, Hackworth marches to his own beat. However, what Hackworth definitely was, was a warrior. Plain and simple. Plus, he unmistakably cared for the welfare of the men under him. In many ways, Hackworth only wanted to be the best at what he did, he just wanted the freedom to do it his own way. As I mentioned before in my review of "Steel", Hackworth is a man who pulls no punches when it comes to what he thinks. The only times I didn't enjoy what Hackworth had to say, was when he continually described his "scrounging efforts", done in order to get what he wanted. Stealing, bribing, "borrowing", and general subterfuge where not below this man. Other than his massive ego, that's the main trait of Hackworth that I don't agree with. Then again, the years that Hackworth spent in the peacetime Army training for useless missions and wars that would never come; along with the mountains of paperwork and the general tedium of the life at that time; one can definitely understand that.Overall, my opinion of Hackworth hasn't changed drastically from reading About Face. He's still egotistical, he's still lacking in certain moral areas, but what Hackworth really was was a pure, dyed-in-the-wool soldier. A brave and decorated man who lived an incredible, if not crazy life.

[chris_el-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of a very highly decorated U.S. Army vet whose records include 2 DSC, 10 silver stars, and 8 Purple Hearts.

Hackworth joined the military at 14 during WWII. He did not see combat then but saw plenty of it in Korea a few years later. He was given a battle field commission there and served in combat as both an enlisted man and a front line officer. Hackworth also relates his service in Vietnam and his disenchantment with the Army as the bureaucrats and ticket punchers took over and the fighting man was poorly trained or rewarded when it came to the higher officer ranks.

These lessons and problems he discusses are still relevant to our military today.


I'm going to add two stories from the book that stood out to me.

“I remember in Italy in 1946, when I was detailed to guard German prisoners of war. One of the prisoners was a tough lieutenant captured at Salerno. He spoke English, so I whiled away my duty hours giving him a hard time. Once I asked why, if he and all he Kraut friends were such brilliant soldiers and supermen, was a 15 year old me the one holding the weapon and he was a prisoner of war? He answered me with a story. “I was an 88-mm anti-tank battery commander,” he said. “We were on a hill and the Americans kept sending tanks down the road below. Every time they sent a tank, we knocked it out. They kept sending tanks, and we kept knocking them out, until we finally ran out of ammunition. The reason I’m here,” he finished his story, “is the Americans didn’t run out of tanks.”


After WW II, a boy named Willie Lump Lump enlisted in the Army. He went to Fort Benning to take his infantry training, sixteen weeks of sweat and tears and lots of punishment, to turn him into a hardened soldier. Along about the seventh week of training, a sergeant stood up in front of his class and said, “Gentlemen, I’m Sergeant Slasher, and today I’m going to introduce you to the bayonet. On guard!” With that, the sergeant went into the correct stance for holding the bayonet. “On the battlefield,” he continued, “you will meet the enemy, and there will be times when you will need this bayonet to defeat the enemy. To KILL the enemy! Over the next weeks you’ll be receiving a twenty-four hour block of instruction on the bayonet, and I will be your principal instructor.”
Willie Lump Lump went back to the barracks, deeply upset. Man, that was so brutal out there today, he thought. The war is over. We’re living in peace and tranquility, and still the Army is teaching us how to use these horrible weapons! “Dear Mom,” he wrote home. “Today the sergeant told me he’s going to teach me how to use the bayonet to kill enemy soldiers on the battlefield.”
Willie’s mother was shocked. She got right on the phone: “Hello, Congressman DoGood? This is Mrs. Lump Lump. I want to tell you what’s happening down at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here it is, 1949, and they’re teaching my baby to kill with a bayonet. It’s uncivilized! It’s barbaric!”
The congressman immediately got on the horn. “Hello, General Playitright at the Pentagon? This is Congressman Dogood. I understand the Army is still giving bayonet training.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Do you think it’s a good idea? I don’t think it’s a very good thing at all. It’s even… somewhat uncivilized. I mean, really, how many times does a soldier need his bayonet?”
“Not very often, sir, it’s true. Actually, I was just reviewing the Army Training Program myself, and I was thinking that the bayonet is a pretty obsolete weapon. I agree with you. I’ll put out instructions that it’s going to stop.”
The next day, seven hundred miles away: “Gentlemen, I am Sergeant Slasher. This is your second class on bayonet training –“ The sergeant was interrupted by a lieutenant walking purposefully toward him across the training field. “Stand easy, men.”
“It’s out,” the lieutenant whispered.
“What!” said the sergeant.
“It’s out,” the lieutenant whispered again.
The sergeant nodded, his mouth wide open in disbelief. He returned to his class.
“Gentlemen, we’ll have to break here. It looks as if bayonet training has been discontinued in the Army.”
A year later, PFC Lump Lump, the model soldier, deployed to Korea with the 1st Battalion, 15th Regiment, 3d Infantry Division. He was standing on a frozen hill and the Chinese were coming at him – wave after wave after wave. Willie stood like a rock. Resolutely, he shot the enemy down. Suddenly he realized he was out of ammunition. He looked at his belt – not a round left. He saw a Chinaman rushing toward him. He remembered the first class on bayonet training. He reached down and pulled his bayonet out of his scabbard. Shaking and fumbling, he tried to fit it on the end of his weapon, but by that time the Chinese soldier was standing over him, with a bayonet of his own.
The Secretary of the Army signed his thousandth letter for the day: “Dear Mrs. Lump Lump: It is with deep regret that I must inform you that your son, PFC Willie Lump Lump, was killed in action 27 November 1950.”
Heartbroken, Mrs. Lump Lump wrote to some friends of young Willie’s in the company. “How?” she asked. “Why???” “Willie wasn’t trained,” they wrote back. “He didn’t know how to use his bayonet.” Now Mrs. Lump Lump was not only heartbroken, but outraged. She didn’t even bother to call Congressman DoGood. She barged right into his office.
“Why?” she cried and screamed. “Why wasn’t my son trained for war?”
The mythical Willie Lump Lump was my training aid. I used him in every unit I commanded, to explain two things to the troops: first, that the training they were about to receive was in their best interests, and second, that the civilian population didn’t know diddley-squat about the realities of war.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Colonel David Hackworth is one of America's most decorated soldiers. He was a "mustang," an officer who came up through the ranks. In Hackworth's case he was commissioned on the Korean battlefield. His book describes his love affair with the army, and how he felt our actions in Vietnam destroyed the trust he had in that institution. Soldiers fight often for their friends and comrades rather than for a glorified ideal. Small units develop a unity that perhaps most civilians fail to appreciate. They have to trust each other under very difficult conditions. "The incredible bonding that occurred through shared danger; the implicit trust in the phrase 'cover me' — these were the things that kept me going, kept me fighting here in Korea, and why I'd come back for more. . . ."

One often gets a sense of culture shock reading Hackworth's memoirs. For example, he belonged to an elite combat unit and as all such units are wont to do, they created an emblem for themselves, in this case, a skull. When Korean laborers saw the new sign, they immediately decamped. When asked why, they replied they could not work for anyone who had such little regard for human beings that he could do such a thing. "All of us may have become jaded enough to think the sign was a real masterpiece, but to the poor Koreans our attitude was simply barbaric."

Hackworth's reflections on the post-Korean army are instructive. Eisenhower and Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor were engaged in a large restructuring of the armed forces; a conversion to a nuclear oriented service that required more training and fewer people. Morale was decimated, according to Hackworth when those with even one day less than the eighteen years required for permanent duty were RIF'd or given the option of remaining at a lower grade. Colonels were reduced to master sergeants over night. Battalions were eliminated and reorganized into five rifle groups designed for a nuclear battlefield. This became known as the Pentomic Army that was later eliminated as unworkable. Of more concern, was the insistence on "zero-defects."

Hackworth suggests the competition to be perfect led to "M-1 penciling." It was discovered that a pencil would make a hole in a cloth target that was identical to the hole made by an M-1 bullet. Soon units were turning in great marksmanship scores. Cheating in all manner of things became rampant. Perhaps the swindling had begun with the Korean Certificate of Loss statements where commanders would allow their troops to inflate kill records, "I don't know, but the Post-Korea Army had an unquenchable thirst for perfection which parched the throats of even the most desiccated leaders, and the M-1 pencil was the only water to be found. A CO simply couldn't fail. . . . Our sham of perfection set an unspoken precedent for bigger lies down the road, each and every one of them would ricochet back on the Army as an institution, with the repercussions of it all enough to shake America to its core."

[improbus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is, by far, the absolute best military autobiography I've read. Hackworth should be required reading for every enlisted soldier and officer. There are real life lessons to be learned in this book. NCOs would be wise to heed them.

[matthewn_97 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A truly wonderful read! This guy was the soldier's soldier. I can't recall a time in the book in which I got bored or wondered when this particular section would be over. I wish I could say the same for other biographies. As a former enlisted member of the military, I can say that I wished many times that we had officers of his caliber and perspective. He served in the days when the politics were confined to the upper echelons of the officer ranks for the most part. The military today is full of "empire builders" that Hack would have gladly disposed of had they served under him. You might not agree with all he said or did post-Vietnam, but this man was a true patriot. I know specifically that Night Stalker Mike Durant of Somalia fame( see his book "In the Company of Heroes") was not too thrilled with Hack over some comments he made in regards to the video he made while being held hostage by the Somali's. I tend to agree with Durant's analysis as he did nothing akin to what Hanoi Jane did. Other than that, I was glad that Hack got a decent amount of air time as a commentator on the most recent conflicts. I think his perspective is one worth listening to. I recommend this book to ALL military members, current and former. Additionally, if you have a passing interest in military history or just want to read about an amazing life, pick this book up. You won't be sorry.

[bookmarkaussie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent read. It is really the story of one man's military career, from enlistment in 1946 to leaving the US Army in 1971 as a Colonel who had turned against the war in Vietnam. Each part of the story is well told and interesting. One thing that some might find annoying is that he mentions everyone he's ever met, or at least it can seem that way. I was also surprised to see so much about his service in the Korean war as I thought the book was mostly about Vietnam. That is not a complaint, nor are the chapters on his peacetime service a criticism. I often found myself reading into the next chapter instead of stopping as I normally do. The only point I will make is that this is a memoir and as such one of it's purposes is to put the author in the best possible light. That is true of nearly all memoirs.